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Reviews 265 author includes a parenthetical note: “The words ‘under God’were added byan act of Congress in 1954.” The strongest part of the book is the last half, which is clearly based largely on Kanazawa’spersonal experiences as a child. Details such as his father’s use of old Sears Roebuck catalogs to wipe his razor in the barber shop, or how the children in Sunday school tricked the minister by singing “Bringing in the Cheese,”give an air of believable reality to the story. His account of working in a cannery makes the drudgery of the packing line all too real. Despite the novel’s structural flaws, Sushi and Sourdough presents many such wonderful details of pioneer life in Alaska as seen by a youngJapanese boy, and the book makes clear the lingering pain and scars of prejudice. TERRENCE COLE University ofAlaskaFairbanks Sonoran Desert Summer. ByJohn Alcock. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990. 187 pages, $19.95.) John Alcock writes of “noisy violence, sex, and excitement”in SonoranDesert Summer. But not in the guise of most other modern writers. The Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona and northwestern Mexico is home to diverse plants and animals which Alcock devotes himself to studying. In his new book, Alcock, Regent’s Professor of Zoology atArizona State Univer­ sity, presents his scientific perspective on the life forms the desert harbors. The Drosophila nigrospiracula, he tells us, are unable to survive on tissues containing senita alkaloids or triterpene glycosides. But Alcock’s warm subjectivity is also apparent when he writes that “heat has clarified the land” and ‘June is the month of almost no hope.” Alcock’s sensitive blending of empiricism and artistry introduces his read­ ers to the contrasts and the paradoxes of a land which may not receive more than six inches of annual rainfall, where daily temperatures rise above one hundred degrees for months on end. “It is the extreme hostility of the climate that is responsible for the exotic and intriguing nature of the desert’s biology.” Alcock sketches the desert’s summer months, which last from May until September and which he uses to divide the treatise into five sections. Each month provides a unique study of plant and animal activity. By the end of the book, readers have followed the growing season of the Sonoran Desert from beginning to end and caught a glimpse of the magic essence which captivates Alcock. Alcock’s prose is simple, perhaps with too many prepositions and infini­ tives. But his style is refreshing and welcome in an empirical treatise that easily could have proved daunting to readers outside the scientific community. In­ stead, Alcock’s clear, brilliant imagery and sharp, abrupt rhythm convey the 266 'WesternAmerican Literature dramatic colors and textures of the desert, as well as its stillness and powerful silence, and leave readers with a sense of the region’s intensity. Sonoran Desert Summeris a sensitive and at times humorous cataloguing of desert life, realistic and yet poetic enough to convince even the most skeptical that the desert, America’s last frontier, is truly a captivating and enchanting land. R. L. STRENG Texas Christian University The Laying Out of Gussie Hoot. By Margot Fraser. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990. 289 pages, $14.95.) By the end of the richly detailed opening scene, mystery aficionados will have no doubt that Gussie Hoot (Augusta Euanthe Houghton née Merriwether) is asking for it—it being the retribution meted out to feisty old ladies whose hubris lets them make a habit ofleaving the screen door unhooked while every morning they count out stacks of dirty money on the kitchen table. And, indeed, at some delicately concealed point between Chapters 1 and 2, Gussie gets it, setting in motion the leisurely action of Fraser’s engaging first novel. Though motivated by the apparent murder of Gussie, and nudged forward in part by the small-western-town version of police procedure, TheLaying Out of GussieHootdoes not belong solely to the realm of crime fiction. Fraser’s strong sense of place and her classic cast of caricatures and near-caricatures place her firmly in the tradition of western humor, practiced with such success (though...

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